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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#51

Post by s73ver_ »

blunte wrote: post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

I'm sorry, but I cannot get behind the idea that a creator choosing to deliver their content that they made in a form they chose can be hostile to you.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#52

Post by Santosh83 »

ashark wrote: post #7

The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.

Not really. It was doomed the moment it stopped being a place for mere exchange of information and messages and turned into a marketplace. It is the profit motive that has given rise, directly or indirectly, to every good and bad thing about the modern web. Unfortunately profit motive is completely amoral. And it isn't going away. So what we need are more restrictions and regulations. And a paradigm shift back to doing more things more enjoyably in meat-space.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#53

Post by [deleted] »

hasenj wrote: post #36

I think the problem is one of economics. The SV culture made it valuable for startups to amass a large amount of users. Where as before this bubble started, it was more profitable for development shops to build (and sell) software that anyone can use to host their own site/forum/whatever. This might not be the entire solution, but I think it would be a step in the right direction: We need more products that are devel…

[deleted]

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#54

Post by bobajeff »

annabellish wrote: post #9
gruez wrote: post #2

>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites. no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers? >HERE WeGo for maps (free) i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy

It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.

I think trying to fight a browser engine monoculture is a lost cause. There is no money in building browser engines and it costs a lot of time and money to create one from scratch.

The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons.

The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#56

Post by [deleted] »

amorphid wrote: post #40
pmoriarty wrote: post #25

"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…

I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

[deleted]

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#57

Post by psyc »

wvenable wrote: post #48
blunte wrote: post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

Microsoft is the worst for providing content in video only form (Channel 9). There have been tons of potentially interesting content posted to HN from Microsoft but I'm not going to sit through an hour long video at work. And they almost never provide any alternative text content (an article) for what's in the video.

Unity is terrible too. The text documentation is terse and barely complete. All the details and workflow information is in video form.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#58

Post by DanBC »

amorphid wrote: post #40
pmoriarty wrote: post #25

"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…

I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

One difference is that HN is hosted on a server under the control of YC.

If YC ever decide to destroy HN they can.

With an HN Usenet newsgroup it'd be distributed across all the servers that carry that group. You could download software and host it yourself.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#59

Post by shams93 »

_jal wrote: post #16
blunte wrote: post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.) [1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewindi…

Yeah personally I learn much faster and better by reading than via most videos. You can't keyword search a video, with text documentation I can keyword search within the page to find out exactly what I'm looking for.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#60

Post by shangxiao »

pmoriarty wrote: post #25

"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…

I love the fact that IRC is still alive and kicking. The #django channel on freenode is still pretty active as opposed other communities that flock to slack or gitter.
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